The Wildcats host two more ranked teams this week
The opening week of the season saw a couple of ranked teams come through Tucson, including a former Pac-12 foe. The No. 13 Arizona Wildcats* will face more of the same in week three, but it’s an entirely different level of competition this time.
The Wildcats will face their most difficult weekend of games prior to Big 12 play when No. 1 Texas (11-0) and No. 18 Stanford (9-0) visit for the Hillenbrand Invitational. Arizona will face the Longhorns once and the Cardinal twice, as well as playing UC Davis twice and Colorado State once.
“It’s going to be a big weekend for us,” said Arizona head coach Caitlin Lowe. “I think it’s a lot of great competition coming in, a lot of great offensive numbers, obviously great pitching across the board. So it’s going to be a task for us to have those two double headers right off the bat. And I just want us to be where our feet are and locked into the game that we’re in, in that moment, and playing our type of softball and not really making it about who’s in the other dugout.”
Arizona has shown its offensive power early on even after playing without All-American Dakota Kennedy last week. The ‘Cats are one of the best offensive teams in the country despite playing two teams that were ranked at the time of the games and a group of solid mid-majors.
Lowe said that Kennedy is still being evaluated on a week-to-week basis but they want to give her plenty of time to recover. They don’t want to risk making the injury worse.
“We don’t want to make this a season-long thing,” Lowe said.
Even without their leadoff hitter, Arizona ranks fourth in the country in team batting average (.422), third in on-base percentage (.504), fifth in slugging (.714), and fifth in home runs (20). The Wildcats are sixth in strikeout-to-walk ratio (.48), seventh in strikeout percentage (7 percent), and 18th in walk percentage (14.6 percent).
While Miranda Stoddard has been a big part of those numbers, Kaiah Altmeyer has done a strong job of adapting to both a new defensive position and a new place in the lineup. Altmeyer took over the leadoff spot and left field when Kennedy went out. While both have more power than two-hole hitter Regan Shockey and might seem like good options to hit after her, they are also extremely adept at getting on base.
“I think she’s also built for a spot like that because she’s patient,” Lowe said of Altmeyer. “She takes a lot of pitches. She lives right here and is very even-keeled. So, we told her before the weekend that she’s built for that, and to not change a thing about what she was doing. And I thought she did a great job of that, too, and didn’t let anything really speed up on her.”
Altmeyer leads the team in on-base percentage at .690. That’s 17th in the country. Her 14 walks also lead the team and rank second in Division I. Of the players with qualifying numbers, she has the second-best slugging percentage (.857) on the team. She also has the second-best qualifying batting average among the Wildcats.
As for the team as a whole, they won’t be the only side bringing in great offensive numbers. This week they will face a team that can challenge them in all of those areas, tand it isn’t Texas.
The Stanford Cardinal have been known as a team that wins with pitching over the past few years. Alana Vawter was followed by NiJaree Canady in making Palo Alto a haven for dominant pitchers. Both are gone now. The Cardinal are finding success in other ways in the early going.
Stanford’s team batting average is a dominant .456, ranking second in the country. That’s two spots above Arizona. On-base percentage? Also second at .532. That’s one spot above the ‘Cats. Slugging? How about first at .806, coming in four places above Arizona. The Cardinal have hit 19 home runs, one fewer than Arizona.
The question for Stanford is whether it can maintain those numbers when the competition takes a step up. Unlike Arizona, the Cardinal have not played any ranked teams. Their schedule has consisted almost entirely of mid-majors from California and the Pacific Northwest. The best game on the early schedule would have been against Long Beach State, but that contest was canceled.
While Stanford is trying to establish its footing after the loss of Canady, top-ranked Texas knows where it stands. While the Longhorns haven’t faced the toughest slate, they have already gone up against the Cardinal’s former ace and her new team.
UT swept Texas Tech in two games during the opening week of the season. The Red Raiders were ranked No. 8 and No. 11 in the top two polls at the time. The Longhorns squeaked out a 2-1 win in nine innings against Canady. In the second outing, they run-ruled the Raiders 11-0 in five innings.
*All rankings in this article use the USA Today/NFCA poll.
Lead photo courtesy of Arizona Athletics